Sovereign Hope (2 page)

At this point
it became obvious to the other guys that their friend wasn’t
getting back up. Both Scar-face and the other Russian leapt forward
and fell upon the black-clad guy still lying on the ground. He was
hidden from view for a second before a strange pulse distorted the
air, and then the attackers flew backwards. They landed with a bone
crunching thump on the scorched concrete. Mr.
I-Think-You-Should-Come-With-Me jumped to his feet and froze when
he saw me.

“
Forget about waiting,” he yelled. “Run!”

His command
seemed to remind the other men of my presence. The remaining
Russian and Scar-face were rolling onto their fronts in an attempt
to reach me when the guy in black lunged forward. I wanted to run
but I couldn’t. The sight of my unlikely rescuer froze me to the
spot. The usual signs that preceded a hallucination—the heady,
overpowering floral smell, like rotting lilies, or a burnt,
metallic taste in my mouth—weren’t present, but there was no way
any of this could be real.

His hands… his hands were 
alight
. The white-blue glow coming
off them was so bright I had to look away, and when I closed my
eyelids, the echo of the burning brightness swam and twisted before
my eyes. It pushed down against my defences, threading inquisitive
fingers into my mind—a sensation so intrusive I physically clawed
at my head in order to push it away. It ended in an instant, but
the violated feeling set over me like unbreakable cement. The air
crackled around me as I stepped back, and the truck’s charred metal
sang like it was supercharged with electricity.

“
Farley! Run!”

This time I
didn’t hesitate. By the time my vision recovered, I’d already run a
hundred feet, weaving blindly between the empty cars and trucks and
buses. I’d never run so fast in my life, and yet it still didn’t
feel fast enough.

I only paused when a thunderous boom ripped high above the
sirens and the shouting. A hasty glance behind me revealed a cloud
of black smoke
spiraling
upwards in the rain, and
flames, the regular orange and yellow kind, roaring skywards above
the roofs of the trapped cars. An undeniable, sinking certainty
told me that it was coming from my truck. 

Correction
.

My mom’s
truck.

******

I ran into the
Staples Centre car lot to find Tess had gotten out of her sedan and
was pacing back and forth in the rain with her arms folded across
her chest. She would have been immediately visible in a crowd twice
the size. Her crazy, curly Afro was a dead giveaway. She was half
Egyptian, and her golden skin shone in the flat afternoon light.
When I reached her, Tess pinned me under suspicious eyes the color
of an unsettled ocean, blue one minute, green the next.

“
What the…?” she gasped. Tess’ horror was understandable. I
looked like a drowned rat. My hair had teased free of its twist and
was plastered to my skin, and my clothes…Urgh. My clothes. My jeans
were streaked black, and my white cotton shirt was filthy and
ripped, destroyed beyond repair. There were probably a few smudges
of blood underneath all that dirt and oil, but after that light
coming off the guy’s hands my eyes didn’t seem to be processing
color properly.

I hooked Tess
by the arm and pulled her backwards through the crowds of people
gathering to watch the fire catch along the length of Figueroa.
“Told you.”

“
Told me what?” Tess cried.

“
I
 told
 you I was being followed.”

CHAPTER TWO

Thrown to the Wolves

I was eight
years old the first time I saw something I shouldn’t have. My mom
was hanging out the laundry. It was a balmy summer afternoon, and
the tang of brine was lingering on the air—an imagined hint of the
ocean, seeing as the real thing was miles away.

I was playing in the long grass off the field at the back of
the house when I noticed the ripples of heat shimmering in the air.
Behind the snapping white sheets on the line, all I could make out
was my mom’s silhouette, moving from basket to line and back again.
Even at eight I knew a shadow shouldn’t look like that. Twisted
fingers of 
something bad
were wreathed around my mom’s form, licking
towards the sky, ravenous and hungry.

When I
screamed, my mom appeared in a second, terrified something had
happened to me. The sight still haunted me: my mother, ablaze, hair
nothing more than blackened stubble against her head, small scraps
of her blue and white striped dress swirling above her into the
air. An acrid smoke twisting upward from her scorched limbs.

And none of it
had been real.

Doctor Reynolds became a regular fixture after that. He
suspected the brightness of the sun had affected my vision and
diagnosed me as suffering from migraine with aura. That meant my
sight might go haywire if I got a headache. No one seemed to listen
to me when I told them that my sight hadn’t just gone weird,
though—that my mom had actually been 
on fire.
 

They hadn’t
listened afterwards, either, when I told them about the explosions
I saw in the sky from time to time, or when the neighbor’s cat
turned up without its skin. Which was often. Eventually I learned
to keep my mouth shut. It was easier to lock myself away in my room
and pretend that they were right than face the possibility that I
might actually be losing my mind. Sometimes, I liked to think my
episodes were totally normal, a hereditary defect passed down by my
father. It was a convenient lie I told myself, given that my father
had died in a car crash before I was born and wasn’t around to deny
it.

 
It had been that way for the last ten
years, and now, at eighteen, I was still no closer to understanding
what was wrong with me. Still no less scared.

The echo of that emotion resounded through me as Tess pulled
into my driveway. This was different. Imagining my mother on fire
was one thing, but having people, 
real people
, coming after me for no
apparent reason, left me on edge and feeling significantly out of
my depth.

“
Here we are. Home, safe and sound,” Tess said in a singsong
voice.

Home was a
white Colonial with sunshine-yellow shutters framing the windows,
traditional, and perhaps a little more run-down than the neighbors
would have liked. Completely different from their white stucco
Spanish villas with heated pools out back. I turned from staring
numbly out of the window and gave Tess a doubtful look.

“
I don’t know about safe. That Dodge was parked on the corner
this morning.”

It did feel
better being back in Monterey Hills, though, and Figueroa was far,
far away. All the same, I knew it was a false sense of security,
like running to hide in your bed when your house is being
robbed.

I opened the
front door, for once not feeling my stomach knot as I waited for my
mother to call out. I should have been used to coming home to an
empty house by now, but it was still hard. Things might have been
different, of course; I could have been taken into foster care.
Social services hadn’t exactly been pleased with the idea of me
living alone after all, but I’d made it perfectly clear I would
make my foster parents’ lives hell if I had to. There was no way I
was going to leave the house I’d grown up in, and my eighteenth
birthday had been on the horizon anyway, so they’d agreed to let me
live alone so long as I kept up with school.

Once inside
the house, I triple-checked that the door was locked and paused at
the window, peering anxiously up and down the street.

“
Come on, there’s no one there. You want coffee?” Tess
asked.

“
Yeah, sure, why not? I’m only on the brink of a nervous
breakdown. I can’t imagine why caffeine wouldn’t help this
situation.”

We walked
through to the kitchen. I sank down onto a stool at the breakfast
bar where me and my mom had completed the New York Times crossword
every Sunday as a ritual.

The rain had
finally stopped, and the late afternoon sunlight slanted through
the kitchen blinds, stacking long, thin strips of cool yellow over
the linoleum floor and up the opposite wall. It barcoded Tess as
she shifted around the open kitchen, preparing the coffee.

“
You’ve got messages,” she said, gesturing to the answering
machine at my elbow. It was true. The red light blipped
malevolently at me. Getting voicemail was usually exciting; there
was always a glimmer of hope that it might be from my mom. Not
today, though. There was only one person who would be leaving me
messages today. I braced myself and hit the play button.

“
Farley, this is Detective Miller. Just calling to check in,
make sure everything’s okay. Oh, also…do you have any thoughts as
to why the charred carcass of your Toyota Tacoma might have been
abandoned downtown this afternoon? If you could call me when you
get this message, that would be great.”

The red light
flashed, indicating that there were more messages to follow, but I
hit the delete button anyway. They would all be from Miller, and I
hadn’t come up with anything good to tell him yet. Spontaneous
combustion probably wasn’t going to cut it. In truth, what I really
wanted to say was that the truck had been stolen and deny being
there at all. But there had been far too many people out on the
street, not to mention that sour-looking old bat who had gotten a
good look at me. She had probably already given a statement
confirming that I was the root cause of the afternoon’s breakdown
in civilization, and yes, I had last been spotted fleeing the scene
like a criminal. So what was I supposed to say to Miller? Even
explaining it to Tess, who was normally so good at accepting all
the weird, hallucination-related crazy that often invaded my life,
was proving difficult.

“
Start over,” she demanded, pouring hot coffee into mugs for
the both of us. “I still don’t get it. The guy who saved you
was 
hot
?”

Typical. She
 would
 get stuck on that
point. “Yeah, but—”

“
Did you get his number?”

“
Tess! This is serious.” I accepted the mug she offered out to
me. “I have to think of something to tell Miller.”

“
I only have one suggestion. You’re probably not going to like
it, though.”

Tess’
suggestions were rarely likeable. They usually involved trawling
the local malls for cute guys to stare at, or purchasing fake IDs
from scary weed dealers. “Just hit me.” Even a bad suggestion was a
suggestion, after all, and at this stage I was willing to consider
anything.

“
Tell the truth.”

Anything but
that. I placed the coffee mug down slowly and gave my friend a dry
stare. “No. Way.”

Tess rolled
her eyes. “Look. You were driving down Figueroa, for crying out
loud. It was packed with people. And those big trucks? Y’know, the
big fire-engine-red ones? Well, I hate to break this to you but
they were, indeed, fire engines. Half of LA’s emergency services
probably saw you down there. It’s better that you tell him the
truth than make up something even more unbelievable.”

Tess did have
a point, but there was just no way Detective Miller was going to
buy that I was attacked by three guys in an SUV, that I was saved
by another stranger (who had also been following me, as far as I
could tell), and that he had some sort of freakish power that
turned his hands into burning white light. He was more likely to
believe disgruntled aliens incinerated the truck. I collapsed face
first on the counter. “Can’t you think of something else?”

“
Nope.” 

I groaned, but
the outlandish truth-telling concept was prevented from taking any
real shape when Tess’ phone rang. She shot me a furtive look.
“Sorry. I have to take this.” She slipped out of the back door to
stand in the yard with her coffee mug steaming in the brisk
air.

My own coffee
was making my stomach churn. I got up and poured myself a glass of
water. I paced the kitchen for a moment and then stalked to the
hallway, pausing to study the jigsaw puzzle of photo frames that
hung on the wall by the front door. There were at least thirty,
ranging in size from the tiny heart-shaped frames that used to hang
off the Christmas tree when I was a kid, to the largest—a square,
silver frame, easily the length of my arms stretched wide. It was a
black and white picture of my mom cradling me in her arms, just a
few days old. My mom wore a dazed expression on her face, that
mixture of astonishment and confusion that you saw on most new
mothers.

I stood with
the glass sweating in my hand, studying the pictures from our
annual summer trips up the coast, to Disneyland, New York, Knott’s
Berry Farm, elementary and high school, realizing that in every
single picture my mom bore some degree of that same expression,
mixed with a quiet pride.

At that moment my fragile grasp on my emotions began to
waver. Even on a good day, the panic constantly roiling away just
below the surface was difficult to contain. On bad days, it broke
through in bursts that threatened to smash my resolve into dust.
Today was a bad day. My mother was 
gone
. Not just disappeared on an
unplanned vacation kind of gone, or 
Off to the store, be back in five 
kind of gone. She had just left work one day in the middle of
the afternoon and had never come back. No note. No phone call. Not
even an email.